The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Device Management (DM) specification supports extensions called Management Objects (MOs), which are logical collections of related pieces of data stored in a virtual DM tree. A device that supports OMA DM typically has an embedded OMA DM client that acts as an intermediary between MOs and the applications, functions, agents, or other software or firmware components on the device that might make use of the MOs to configure their services. Any such component will be referred to herein as an agent.
Each MO on a device typically contains data related to a specific agent or type of agent on the device. For example, an email MO might contain data associated with an email agent. If multiple email agents are installed on a device, each might use a separate email MO, or they might all use the same email MO. All of the MOs and agents on a device typically interact via a single DM client.
As used herein, the term “device” might in some cases refer to mobile devices such as mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, handheld or laptop computers, and similar devices that have telecommunications capabilities. In other cases, the term “device” might refer to devices that have similar capabilities but that are not transportable, such as fixed line telephones, desktop computers, set-top boxes, or network nodes. The term “device” can also refer to any hardware or software component that can terminate a communication session.